What? (1972) [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: June 9, 2015

What? (1972)
A Film by Roman Polanski
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | 01:49:06 | 7,72 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: None
Genre: Black Comedy, Art-house

Director: Roman Polanski
Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Sydne Rome, Hugh Griffith

A young American woman (Sydne Rome) traveling through Italy finds herself in a strange Mediterranean villa where nothing seems right. Her visit becomes an absurd, decadent, oversexed version of "Alice in Wonderland", with Marcello Mastroianni as the maddest of mad hatters and Roman Polanski a kinky March hare….

More than three decades after its controversial release, it remains the most butchered, debated and least-seen film of the Oscar winning and controversial director Roman Polanski's entire career.

IMDB | Wikipedia | amazon.co.uk

Pretty much Roman Polanski's rarest film these days – the print for the DVD was supposedly stolen from producer Carlo Ponti's vault - What? is a surprisingly enjoyable reimagining of Alice in Wonderland as a 70s sex comedy with Sydne Rome escaping a trio of inept rapists via cable car to a beachside villa where she encounters various human equivalents of Lewis Carroll's creations trapped in their own perverse fantasy worlds.


Thus the White Rabbit becomes a doddering caretaker, Tweedledum and Tweedle Dee a pair of ping pong playing layabouts, the walrus a priest on a lilo, the March Hare Polanski's harpoon-wielding Mosquito ("That filthy little dwarf!"), the White Knight Hugh Griffith's dying patriarch and the Mad Hatter Marcello Mastroianni's ex-pimp, ping pong ball crusher and tiger impersonator.


Did I mention the American tourists? It has it's own dreamlike logic and acceptance of the absurd that will certainly alienate some viewers as it did most contemporary critics: the only thing that people find hard to accept in this beautiful sun drenched locale are logic and reasons, preferring to stay hidden in their own recurring obsessions. Rome isn't much of an actress but she does have the ability to retain an air of innocence even when completely naked, which is the main demand of the part, and the film is surprisingly well cast, with Mastroianni relishing the chance to play laid-back sleazy and Polanski himself at his funniest when delivering offscreen death threats. It's all nonsense and knows its nonsense – even the end, explaining away its own arbitrary absurdity while revealing the film's title – but if you're simpatico, it's surprisingly seductive nonsense.
IMDB Reviewer

Some have described Roman Polanski's least popular film "What?" as a sensual reworking of "Alice in Wonderland." Others have called it a soft-core porno film or a "hippie" film. What makes Polanski's film special is that it defies description altogether, and it fits into Polanski's themes of protagonists stuck in a world as deranged and as lunatic as they are.


Sydne Rome is the Girl, a hippie hitchhiking through Italy. At the start of the film, she is practically raped by three guys and manages to escape to the nearest gorgeous villa. She arrives inside the villa, is given a room for free, and is mostly harrassed and defiled by a former pimp (Marcello Mastroianni). The pimp may be a homosexual and gets turned on when he dresses like a tiger and is whipped. This classy guy crushes golfballs with his feet, hates silence, and uses and abuses the Girl at every opportunity.


This Girl is one unlucky chick. Her clothes are stolen by Mosquito (Roman Polanski), a drifter or some kind of bizarre character who lives with other misfits above her bedroom - he and his buddies spend their day having sex and playing ping-pong. Another character lives in one room whose only preoccupation is to play Mozart on the piano. Two women are always seen wearing hats and little else. Another man groans in his bedroom each time the Girl passes by. To perhaps remind herself she is not dreaming all this, the Girl writes absurd entries in her diary, which is under her arm at all times."What?" is certainly an appropriate title for this nondescript film.


"What?" is a black comedy with the distinctive silences and long takes that marked Polanski's brilliant "Cul-De-Sac." "What?" is not as ingratiating as "Cul-De-Sac," but it is as inspiring and as surreal as most of Roman's other works. It is almost classifiable as soft-porno, but it pokes fun at the genre, refusing to allow the lead actress Rome to indulge in much sex at all. Of course, through most of the film, she walks around nude, and even sits nude at the breakfast table. "Get out of here while you can from all this decadence," warns one character to Rome. She could have left at anytime if she were able to get some clothes on and hitch a ride back to civilization.


Every character treats Rome as a sexual object of desire, something to be enamored of because of her figure and her bubbly personality. Still, she allows herself to succumb to the pimp's desires, or the millionaire (Hugh Griffith) who asks her to remove her panties. Even the pianist sleeps on her crotch while she is asleep and, when awaken, is shocked that she feels violated. It is questionable if Rome's character loves the pimp, but he has perhaps made her feel whole again. There is no doubt that she has been changed by her experiences at the mansion.


"What?" was shown uncut in Europe and abroad, but was given the ax in a truncated version called "Diary of Forbidden Dreams" (cut from a 112 minute length to 94 minutes). I have never seen that version but I suspect American distributors had no idea what they had. "What?" never quite falls into any feasible category, and it is in fact too wild and exaggerated for mainstream tastes. But its surreal sexual situations and voyeuristic tension invariably hit home (and perhaps led to one of Polanski's later masterpieces such as "Bitter Moon"). Comical and sensual, often mesmerizing yet off-putting at times, "What?" is clearly one of the strangest film experiences I have ever had, and it bears Polanski's visual stamp all the way.
When in Rome with Roman…

Special Features:
- Interview with actor Sydne Rome (~16min)
- Interview with composer Claudio Gizzi (~22min)
- Interview with cinematographer Marcello Gatti (~16min)
- Theatrical trailer

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